by David Malouf
He sat very quiet, swinging his legs, which did not quite reach the ground, and every minute or so would lean forward and peer down over his knees, as if he expected, since he last looked, that he might have grown a bit. Or maybe he was just fond of his boots. He was very pleased with himself.
And why shouldn’t he be? Someone, his mother probably, had got him up for a proper outing. Everything about him was neatly buttoned and tied, his hair combed, nails clean. He was perfect except for his teeth. She could have whipped him up in her arms and half squeezed the breath out of him. But little kids scare easily, she knew that from experience. She didn’t want to put him off. At last she got round him with a lolly.
She offered it and he looked sideways at Vic, who was busy talking, to see if he should accept, and when Vic nodded, put his hand out, undid the wrapper and popped it into his mouth. Then looked in dismay at his sticky hands. He was a very neat little fellow.
She took the wrapper from him and ran off into the house to get a flannel, but when she got back he was licking his fingers like a cat. What amazed her was the pinkness of his tongue. She laughed, just to see it, and squeezing up to him on the bench, said, ‘Hey, what’s your best colour? Mine’s yellow. What’s your best cartoon?’
He looked at her then, a little crease appeared on his brow, and he shifted on the seat, closer to his father. She’d lost him.
So all the years he’d been coming it was something different, the present he brought, and he was different too. Meatier.
Digger was the one he was after, but she was the one he tried to get around. She knew that and kept an eye on him. She wasn’t that much of a dill.
And each time the car he came in was different too. Bigger, a new one each time. He would drive up to where the track turned down sharp towards the store, park it there under the firs, then walk.
Sometimes, after they had had a bit of a talk, he and Digger would go back to the car and look it over. Walk round and round it, opening the bonnet, putting their heads in. Then Digger would get into the driver’s seat behind the wheel, the engine would turn over, and she would hold her breath, expecting them to take off. But all they did was let it run a little. They never went anywhere. They would sit in the car then and talk.
When they got out and were down the river again, she’d go and have a bit of a look for herself. She didn’t open the bonnet. Just stuck her head in the front window on the driver’s side and smelted the leather, and looked at the numbers and that on the dashboard.
There was a mystery about cars – they were men’s business, cars – that she had never fathomed. It had to do with going places.
Men didn’t like to stay put. She knew that from her father. From Digger too. You could see it in the way they got their hands round that wheel. Some power came right up through them when the motor started and they used their foot to make it roar. They were already on the way.
That’s why Vic let Digger do it. He was letting him in on the mystery. When they looked under the bonnet they were examining the source of it. When he got Digger into the driver’s seat and let him start the engine up he was offering him the chance to get away.
Unhappily she walked round the thing, looked at the tyres and kicked the back one hard. It had air in it, but if it hit a nail for instance it could go flat. She considered using a pin, only they’d know who did it.
The big shiny machine, always well polished and each time bigger, parked there at the entrance to the track, was a warning he set. It was meant to show her the power he had: what it was, out there, that he was in touch with, and that Digger might have too if he went away. Big, it was. All metal and shining. With an engine in it that roared and could take you off fast. Anywhere.
Once they came up on her when she was still looking.
‘Let me take you for a spin,’ Vic offered, but she was too smart to fall for that one.
He was grinning at her. Crafty bugger!
‘No thanks,’ she told him, and stomped off.
She did think she had him once. Just this once he arrived in a car driven by a chauffeur and was in a real state – she had never seen that before. She watched him and Digger walk up and down, then went off quickly to see what the chauffeur was up to.
He was sitting in the front seat with his cap off and his eyes shut, a good-looking young feller, sleeping.
But when she got up close he wasn’t sleeping at all. He had like little buttons in his ears and was tapping his fingers, with their bitten-down nails, on the steering-wheel.
Well, she knew what that was. Digger had one. Vic had given it to him. Only Digger’s had a metal band that went over his head, under his hat. He would sit out on the porch and be there for hours sometimes while she raged up and down looking for excuses to break in.
He had an old genoa-velvet lounge out there and a mulga-wood smoker’s stand with a tray, and he would sit for hours with that thing, that Walkman in his lap, plugged in. You had to shout to get him to come in for tea, and even then he didn’t always hear; he was too absorbed. She would have to go out and signal, do a slow dance, and he would look up puzzled, as if he was so far off that he couldn’t make out who it was galumping about on the horizon there and signalling to him.
He wore the phones to spare her the dirges he listened to, she knew that, but she resented them just the same, and suspected Vic of giving Digger the thing as another way of taking him off. Digger was a walkover. Anything mechanical he couldn’t resist.
She would have liked to listen in one time, just to see if the music told you anything, gave you a clue. It was classical, of course, but who knows? – she might have got something out of it. But all she caught when she got close was a high tinny sound, like some animal, a calf or a nanny-goat wearing a bell, that had strayed off and was wandering along a boundary fence somewhere trying to get through.
What she did know was that once Digger was plugged in to the thing all communication between them was cut. He was off in a world of his own, like the kids that turned up in the store on Sunday afternoons, shuffling about to the noise in their heads, and when she spoke to them shouting as if she was the one that had deafened herself. So she knew that far-off look on the chauffeur’s face.
She lowered her head to the back window and he didn’t even see her. He was smiling, his head on the back of the seat, his eyes closed. His cap, which was black with a shiny peak, was on the shelf above the dashboard. He was tapping his fingers on the wheel. She could smell the leather in there.
Suddenly he jerked upright, his eyes open just a foot from hers. ‘Jesus!’ he said. She had scared the pants off him.
Later, watching from the house, she saw him get out of the car and take off his jacket. All he had on underneath was braces. He walked down to the river and sat. He picked up bits of bark and tossed them into the stream, watching them whirl and slip away. Over and over he did it. At last she went down to him.
‘I bet you could do with a cuppa,’ she said, as lightly as she could manage. She wasn’t used to young fellers. She scared them.
He looked up at her. He was so bored with waiting.
‘I don’t mind,’ he said, and gave a bit of a grin.
‘An’a pikelet, eh?’
‘I don’t mind,’ he said.
‘And jam.’
He looked at her again and there was a flicker of doubt in him. She always went too far. ‘Come on then,’ she said quickly.
She sat him at the kitchen table and recalled vaguely that she had planned this a long time ago, only on that occasion it had been a little kid. Could this be him grown up?
‘Hey,’ she said, as she set a plate in front of him. ‘You oughta put bitter allers on ’em.’ She was referring to his nails, which were bitten to the quick.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Bitter allers. It’s ’orrible – but then you wouldn’t bite ’em.’
He flushed and put his hands away under the table. He was a good-looking feller but with eyes that kept darting abo
ut. He was unsure of her, or maybe it was of himself.
She tried a few questions. ‘Hey,’ he said to show how clever he was, ‘you’re on the pump!’ He laughed. But once he’d shown that he knew what she was up to, he was quite happy to rattle away.
Brad, he was called. He had been Mr Curran’s driver for two years. Before that he’d been a courier and before that worked in a motorbike shop. He’d struck it lucky this time. Vic Curran was a good sort of bloke to work for, very strict mind you, but fair, and he had stacks. ‘Stacks,’ the fellow said, taking another dob of cream, and his eyes lit up in a way she found unpleasant. He was greedy.
‘Got a terrific house out Turramurra,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’ mind livin’ in it. I got this nice little flat now, North Sydney, two rooms. Costs me ninety-eight dollars a week – that’s cheap! But I wouldn’ mind livin’ in a place like that. I will too, one day . . .’
He would have gone on like this, but she got impatient. This wasn’t the sort of thing she was after.
‘You’re stupid,’ she said viciously, and the young man, his mouth half-open and full of pikelet, looked as if she had leaned across and bitten his nose. He was that astonished. Serve him right.
‘What about Digger?’ she demanded.
He drew back and looked at her. ‘Who’s Digger?’ he asked.
That did it. She gave him a shove then with the heel of her hand against his shoulder, and for all the heftiness of him he very nearly went over backwards out of his chair.
‘All right,’ he said. He got up, very flushed and foolish looking.
He didn’t know how to deal with her. If it was a man he would have flattened him.
‘F’ Christ’s sake!’ he said under his breath. He got into his uniform jacket and tugged it down hard, making himself stiff and formal. He was on his dignity now. He strode out.
‘I buggered it up,’ she told herself miserably. ‘It was me best chance and I buggered it up.’
She never saw that driver again, as she had never seen the little boy either. The next time Vic came he drove himself.
When she was very little and Digger just a baby she had been set sometimes to look after him. ‘You watch Digger now,’ her mother had told her, ‘there’s a good girl. I’m depending on you.’ She had believed always that the time might come when she would have to do it again.
Digger thought he was protecting her, and he was too, she was dependent on him. But he was too trusting, Digger. He knew a lot, he knew heaps, he could do things. But he didn’t know about the world, and she did. She knew how cruel it was. It didn’t matter what you knew or where you’d been – Digger had been overseas even, to the war even, she’d never been anywhere. To Brisbane. That wasn’t anywhere. But she did know what the world was. It could come at you, all the evil and cruelty of it, in a single blow: a big hand wet as a mackerel coming slam at the side of your head, knocking you sideways, and in just a fraction of a second you’d got all there was to know of how wicked it could be. Sister Francis of the Wash, that was. All six foot of her, looming up in a cloud of steam just as you were hoiking a stickful of sheets out of the copper, and knocking you sideways without a word. Wuthering Heights, that was. Or to give it its proper name, All Hallows Convent, The Valley, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, The World. Hell.
Some girls, all lined up in buff-coloured uniforms and pale stockings, got a good education there, or so they said. They paid for it. Others, who had fallen like her and had nowhere else to go, worked in the laundry. Except she hadn’t fallen at all – or not till Sister Francis got going. All she had done, once or twice, was lay down.
While she was still carrying her baby she scrubbed floors, and after she’d had it and they took it away without letting her see it even, to see if it had all its right parts, she worked in the wash. Bloody terrified she was most of the time of that Sister Francis, but even more of having to leave.
‘Please, please, Sister,’ she’d jabber, ducking under the fat palms, ‘it wasn’ me. Honest, Sister, I swear t’ God!’ But they kept coming down just the same, all suds, over your left ear or across your face, with all the weight of a six-foot Irish virgin behind them, her temper got up by the fact that you had fallen, and been picked up again, and were still no good. The weight of the whole Catholic Church as well – and she wasn’t even a Mick!
She had run away, oh, heaps of times, heaps! On trams. But that didn’t get you anywhere.
‘Sorry, girlie, this is the terminus.’
A feller in a blue uniform and a little round white cap told her that, a conductor bloke with a leather pouch at his waist and a punch for clipping tickets.
It was Dutton Park that time. She got off the tram, which went on sitting at the end of the line, and climbed up to a bandstand all painted but peeling. From there you could see the whole city, not too far away: the three bridges, the river switching back and forth, even Wuthering Heights with its steep black roofs on a cliff above the water.
The tram, all silver, went on sitting on the line and you could see right through it except for the driver and the conductor bloke who put their feet up on the seat and smoked.
At last the conductor got down. He stood for a moment looking up at her, then swung the pole, and the tram moved off.
It began to get dark. A couple of sailors came, Yanks, with girls, and she got scared.
She ended up walking all the way back. Hours it took. In the blackout, with men and women barging about the pavements and searchlights swinging overhead and crossing, catching stars.
Another time it was a different terminus: New Farm Park. She sat on a bench this time among the rosebushes and a feller come up and started talking to her very fast and with a lot of spit, but kind really. He put his arm round her. He was a bit smelly. Grog. Then he put his wet mouth to her ear, which wasn’t as bad as Sister Francis’s fist, and whispered something dirty; then shoved his hand up her skirt. It was no good her saying anything. But when some people come past she got up quickly and followed them, but turned after a minute to look back.
He was still sitting on the bench. He looked at her like he was ready to cry – he was that disappointed – and she thought, ‘Well, I might as well let him have what he wants, poor bugger, why not?’ He looked that hopeless. Wanting something and seeing you take it away.
She walked back, sat beside him, and they spent a while sleeping in tram-sheds and that. It wasn’t too bad. But when he got on the grog he bashed her about, just like Sister Francis, and called her a dummy, so she went back.
It wasn’t the fear of being alone out there that took her back each time. It was all the hands, even in a crowd of strangers, that kept reaching out to grab or squeeze or pinch or turn themselves into fists and go smash at you. Some of those hands, she knew, might be gentle, but you couldn’t take the risk. Even if they started off gentle, you never knew when they were going to switch. So she went back.
She could have tried a different tram (there were lots), to some other terminus. But she’d already seen two and two was sufficient. She didn’t reckon Ashgrove or Enoggera would have been any better. Or Kalinga or The Grange. So she stuck, and then one day Digger appeared and said, ‘I’ve talked to the boss here, the Mother, and you c’n come back home,’ and that was it. Digger too had been shut up somewhere and had got out – she didn’t know where.
So that was all she had actually seen.
But it was so astounding that it stopped her breath even now just to think of it. The terror of what was possible out there, the cruelty of some people, and how helpless you were once they got stuck into you. You don’t need all that much experience. Two seconds flat and she’d got to the end of her own power to bear it, that was the point. There’s nothing more.
The difference between her and Digger was that Digger had not. He’d never come up against whatever it was, out there, that could utterly flatten him.
‘That sister of yours is a hard nut to crack,’ Vic had said once in the early days, when he still had som
e hope of winning her over.
‘Yairs, well – she’s got a mind of her own,’ Digger told him. ‘I wouldn’ worry about Jenny.’
But he did.
Today, as she bashed the crockery about – ‘There, that’s yours, mister!’ – she kept fixing her eye on him. She had something on her mind.
They sipped their tea and she was still looking. At last, in her abrupt way, she came out with it.
‘Hey,’ she said, cutting right across something Digger was saying, ‘what’ve you done with that little kiddie?’
When they failed to catch on she got furious and shouted.
‘The one you come with!’
It was Digger who saw what she meant.
‘Jenny love,’ he told her, trying to pass it off, ‘that was ages ago, you know that. That was Greg.’ He shot a glance at Vic. ‘He’s grown up. Ages ago.’
That little feller with the sticky fingers that she’d given a lolly to? She couldn’t believe it. How could he? She felt a real dill. Ages, Digger said.
It was true she hadn’t seen him, or even thought of him, for a bit. But ages! And in just that little while he’d grown up into someone. ‘Who?’ she wondered, and was about to ask but thought better of it.
But she felt sad. Something in the news put a real damper on her. Something she had been looking forward to she knew now she would never have.
She glanced up. And that Vic had the oddest look on his face, like there was suddenly nothing to him. Like something, someone, some Sister Francis, had loomed up out of nowhere and king-hit him. She saw right through him to that feller in the long overcoat who had come looking for Digger the first time, nothing to him, thin, pale as potatoes, and she found herself thinking, in spite of herself, ‘You poor bugger! Now what’s gone wrong with you?’
II
1
THE BASIN WAS enamel, white, chipped black at the rim. In the year his mother died Vic brought it to her three and sometimes four times a day. When he was at school or out playing one of their neighbours did it.